Carnegie Mellon University's Robot Hall of Fame is inviting the general public to help select the next four androids to be inducted in a ceremony on Oct. 23, the institution announced this week.

The Robot Hall of Fame (RHOF), created in 2003, commemorates famous automatons from science fiction and realityR2-D2 and C-3PO are in the hall alongside NASA's Mars Sojourner and Honda's ASIMOand showcases inductees at the Carnegie Science Center's roboworld exhibit.

"The technology and art of robotics are advancing at an increasingly rapid rate and so the Robot Hall of Fame also must evolve. As more students, workers, and consumers become accustomed to robots, it seems like a natural step to give the public a voice in selecting inductees," Shirley Saldamarco, RHOF director and Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center faculty member, said in a statement.

The public can vote through Sept. 30 using an online ballot, selecting one robot out of a total of 12 in four categories: Education & Consumer, Entertainment, Industrial & Service, and Research.

The dozen robots up for enshrinement in the 2012 class were selected by 107 "robotics experts, industry leaders, and aficionados" according to the RHOF. The final vote for winners will be based 50 percent on the public vote and 50 percent on the vote of the expert panel.

Entertainment: Pixar's lovable trash-collecting robot WALL-E, Johnny 5 from the Short Circuit films of the 1980s, and Hanna-Barbera's Rosie the robot maid made famous on The Jetsons.

Industrial & Service: The bomb-disposal robot PackBot from iRobot, the automated warehouse systems built by Amazon subsidiary Kiva Systems, and the hydrothermal vent-exploring Jason submersible built by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Research: The rough terrain-navigating BigDog robot built by Boston Dynamics for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Willow Garage's dexterous PR2, and NASA's space-faring Robonaut, which now works alongside humans on the International Space Station.

The Oct. 23 induction ceremony at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, Penn. will be held during the RoboBusiness Leadership Summit and is open to the public.

The celebration will also highlight five robots selected in the RHOF's 2010 classNASA's Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, iRobot's Roomba vacuum cleaner, the da Vinci Surgical System, the T-800 "Terminator" unit memorably played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator franchise, and Silent Running's robotic trio of Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

Damon Poeter got his start in journalism working for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand. He covered everything from local news to sports and entertainment before settling on technology in the mid-2000s. Prior to joining PCMag, Damon worked at CRN and the Gilroy Dispatch. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle and Japan Times, among other newspapers and periodicals.
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